16 October 2018 - 24 September 2018

Time: 3:00 - 4:00pm Speaker: Dr. Emily GraberVenue: TBC

We are pleased to be hosting a visit and seminar by Dr. Emily Graber, a recent PhD graduate of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, at 3pm on Tuesday, 16 October 2018 as part of the Centre for Digital Music's Seminar Series.

Abstract: For performers and listeners, temporal processing during musical sequences is essential for executing and understanding the underlying intention, expression, and structure in music. In performing classical chamber music, players must dynamically monitor their own playing as well as that of their group members for synchrony; they must collectively prepare for and perform rubato or explicit tempo changes while maintaining a convincing, quasi-improvisational sound; and they must actively track time even when the group has rests instead of notes. In order to characterize the neural activities that reflect temporal processing, many previous studies have taken bottom-up approaches, driving temporal expectations with variable stimulus properties and measuring the brain responses elicited by expectation violations. Only recently, without perturbing the stimuli, have some studies started to investigate the neural activities that result from active temporal processing. In this talk I’ll present a paradigm designed to drive the deliberate processes that musicians regularly engage in and the neural correlates of top-down temporal processing found in EEG recordings from highly trained musicians. The results show that oscillatory dynamics in the beta band (13-30Hz) can reflect temporal anticipation in general, fine-grained temporal predictions, and expectations in silence. How this work might be generalized to features beyond tempo and applied to the neural and perceptual processes during real music performance and listening are discussed.

Bio: Emily Graber is a Ph.D. student at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, studying music cognition. Her research investigates the time course of behavioral and neural activities related to temporal processing in musicians, i.e. anticipation and prediction. She is also interested in the performance and processing of musical expression in real time and the differences between speech and song/music. Emily previously studied violin performance (B.M.A.) and interdisciplinary physics (B.S.) at the University of Michigan.